The sale of these birds is all these Quechua women standing against a
wall of Sucre’s market in Bolivia have to contribute to their family’s
survival. And there are millions like them around the world. A reminder to be
grateful for our own lives.

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

The Urucu River carries away the foam of its
spectacular falls upstream. Its waters are reddish like tea because, when
overflowing their banks, they infuse the forest’s dry leaves. They even taste
like tea.

The
Amazon rain forest is not the Green Hell some explorers of old, in search of
glory, would make people believe. At least not if you are not lost in it and
losing your wits and your life. It provides its
Indians a happy and comfortable life working on average less than three hours a
day.

In fact,
it is the world’s most beautiful garden. Photographing this river made me fantasize about
floating down it on my back, as it seemed that
it must lead to some terrestrial paradise.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

My computer did not start this morning, apparently from some hardware problem. I'll try to get help tomorrow, Monday. I'm writing from my wife's computer, but have no access to my digital photos. I hope to start posting new pictures again soon.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

On market day, in Colombia’s Andean town of Antioquia, a farmer returns
home from the market with purchases loaded on an ox. Along the wall other
farmers are waiting their turn to sell their bags of coffee inside the office of
a coffee growers cooperative where it
will be evaluated first.

At sunrise near Thio, on Eritrea’s Red Sea coast, an old Danakil man
rests on his shovel after unclogging a water hole in a dry river bed. His
grandson pulls water from the hole to fill the bag on the donkey.

Unlike desert
Danakil, who raise camels and goats and are nomadic, coastal Danakil are settled
and civilized. At the time of this photograph, in 1967, they fished sharks
whose fins they exported to Aden, in south Yemen, from where they found their
way to China.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Ethiopia’s Danakil nomads build their huts on the Danakil Depressions lava
fields, leaving what little grass-producing sand is available to their camels
and goats. No region on earth is hotter
than theirs, and the lava does all it can to keep it so.

Friday, February 7, 2014

In the fall of 1965 I followed the slow migration of Kuchi nomads from
Afghanistan’s

cooling Hindu Kush Mountains down to warmer Indus valleys where
they would spend the winter. The spectacle of those colorfully dressed Pashtun
people herding thousands of camels, sheep, goats, donkeys, and cows down the
rugged mountains was impressive. Some of them were traders who transported wool,
meat, and dairy products to sell. The three traders pictured here were having a
late lunch of soft cheese. They had unloaded their camels for the day and
stacked their bundles into a protective wall against the wind.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Walking up this rocky path in the Bolivian Altiplano, ahead of a llama salt
caravan I was traveling with, I found those three llamas watching our own
llamas across a ravine with much interest. Llamas can’t stand llamas they did
not grow up with. They lose no
opportunity to start fighting with them.

Signed Prints

There are a thousand pictures on this blog. For a limited time, I'm offering three 8 x 10 inch signed prints of any of them for only $99, shipping included to American addresses. Other sizes available. For more information write to viengleb@aol.com